How I Met Your Mother (which was the chosen title because How I Hung Out with My Best Friends in the Many Years Preceding Meeting Your Mother was too long) is still going very strong after seven seasons. Last season featured some of the series’ best moments (and some of its not so best) and was the show’s second highest rated season thus far. However, the showrunners/creators (Carter Bays and Craig Thomas), the production company (20th Century Fox), and CBS all know that at some point Ted has do meet the damn mom. Well, all three parties have began talks to decide if that is going to happen next year or in a hypothetical ninth season. (More seasons beyond that is also a possibility but a frightening one.) The biggest issue is that CBS’s deals with both Fox and Bay and Thomas end this season, so any additional seasons will demand some serious coin droppage. In an interview in May, Thomas offered his take on eight seasons versus nine seasons:
It’s going to be heartbreaking whenever it ends. Could it be a great ending after eight seasons? Yes. Could it be a great ending after nine seasons? Yes. But I won’t say whether we’re leaning one way or the other. When we were launching the show, we always thought eight seasons would be great for what we were trying to do. So eight would be awesome. But we just came off our best ratings year. We still think we have great stories to tell. I don’t know.
For the fans it comes down to: Is more episodes of a show you love a good thing even if there is an inevitable dip in quality? At least with a final date they’ll be able to plan out ahead of time exactly how everything happens, opposed to the current paradigm of “Let me tell you how I met your mother…wait for it…”
